


The Heart

by cordite



Series: Anatomy [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Post Reichenbach, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-02
Updated: 2012-03-02
Packaged: 2017-11-01 00:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordite/pseuds/cordite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John knew what hearts did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beta, Vivi whose light doth shine like the sun, and to the lovely people who gave me the invite codes to set this thing up. You know who you are.

John knew what hearts did.

He knew the basic anatomy. It was a small muscle, no bigger than the size of a clenched fist, that sat behind an admittedly weak casing of bone and muscle and the visceral pericardium and a fibrous network of connective tissue and blood vessels and neuronal circuitry and mesoderm. And all of that was only held in place with a few millimetres of skin. Fine for most people, but not terribly sturdy when you really got down to it. Four chambers—two atria, two ventricles—superior and inferior vena cava, aorta, pulmonary artery, tricuspid valve, mitral valve. He’d got first honours.

He knew that hearts were not terribly poetic. They did not beat like birds inside a cage. They did not thump tattoos against the ribs. They did not leap into throats or sink to feet. They did not swoop with emotion. They did, however, persist in their contraction, carrying steadily on from birth until death. They could be sped up by adrenaline and norepinephrine. Physical activity—running, jumping, chasing after a man, your gun pointed squarely at the back of his skull. Excitement—birthdays, sex, Christmas morning, pulling the trigger and hitting your mark and watching what’s left of his brain explode out the front of his head. Surprise—a sudden loud noise, a second man appearing out of nowhere. Fear—unexpected movement in a darkened room, the dull thudding sound of a body dropping next to you. Pain—a ripping, a tearing, a whiting out round the edges as you watched yourself turn inside out.

Hearts persisted until they didn’t. They could cease in any number of ways. A myocardial infarction—clot, tachycardia, death anywhere from minutes to hours. Suffocation—fluid slowly filling the thoracic cavity, watching the fear grow in a man’s clay covered face as you both simultaneously realised there was nothing to be done, bradycardia, death in minutes (usually three). Gunshot wound—to the chest and the pericardium would fill with blood in seconds, to the head and the electrical circuitry would short out instantly. In both cases, death. He knew it could, but John had never seen it simply go peacefully. Had never seen it just give up and give out.

This is what he had known about hearts Before.

 

It was During that he’d learned different things.

He knew the way it had sounded in his ears as he’d chased down a taxi through the damp London streets and chased down his own psychosomatic limp in the process. (And anyway, damn his cane and damn his therapist who was never very useful to begin with.) He knew the way it had felt as it filled with anticipation the first time he’d climbed the stairs up to the flat. He knew the enthralling feeling of sinking blood pressure as he walked onto every new crime scene and the equally heady spike whenever he heard the creak of the door down the hall opening mornings or the clinking of medical grade glassware or the shifting of heavy wool as it came in from the cold.

He knew a great deal about the funny feeling he got at the rush of oxytocin and dopamine. Private smirks, little nods of praise, the brief glancing of a hand against his, which was just fucking stupid really. (Stupider still that it was the same sort of feeling he got clutching the Browning he kept under his pillow. His therapist would have a field day with that one.)

Quiet and peaceful seemed ever more distant in those moments, when he became so painfully aware of his own vitality. Ever more distant and ever more distasteful. Who gave a fuck about leaving behind a tidy corpse?

 

After came with it’s own set of lessons.

He learned that if you landed just right from a sixty foot fall, your heart would stop instantly, the light would leave your eyes, even if they were still open and staring, the blood that left your body would stain your face and the collar of your shirt and your favourite blue silk scarf, and that it would take ages to fully wash out of the pavement. (He’d checked once, two weeks on, and had had to have a strong drink and a lie down for the rest of the day. He’d placed a towel under the door jamb so Mrs Hudson wouldn’t hear.) He learned (relearned perhaps—he’d always known) that it took a little while for algor mortis to set in, for your skin to cool, so that the warmth that came off it would be completely at odds with the lack of pulse, and that for one delirious moment you might’ve still been there, inhabiting your body.

He learned that the heart does not break. Of course it wouldn’t—no bones. And of course it made sense in poetry, but in practise, it was inaccurate. An imperfect metaphor. Because it didn’t feel like it had crumbled or cracked. It didn’t feel like it was in pieces. It felt more like a slow weight, something intense and ineffable that crushed more than anything else. It was suffocation and infarction and bullet strike all at once. It was the sort of thing that would have driven him mad if he’d had the energy for it, something that would have made him cry out with the physical pain of it if he could only get enough air. Instead he bore it silently. It was very difficult to do much else with that sort of pressure pinning him down. It was worse than being flayed open and bleeding out on a dusty street and praying to a half-remembered God that he be saved, just this once, just this once, please. He didn’t bother with prayer this time round. There was nothing that God could do now. So he carried this new knowledge, this new unbearable lesson, with him like a talisman, a fifth chamber in his useless heart. Perhaps this was that slow and peaceful death?

 

But neither Before nor During nor After, none of these lessons prepared him for the scent of soot and rain and damp wool that preceded his slow, limping climb up the stairs. None of these could have ever prepared him for the ghostly figure, too thin, too closely shorn. He could not have, from any of his many lessons, articulated what his heart did the moment he heard the voice.

“John.”


End file.
